Icons & Browser Colors

Modern browsers make it easy to customize certain components, like icons, the address bar color, and even add things like custom tiles. These simple tweaks can increase engagement and bring users back to your site.

Provide great icons & tiles

When a user visits your webpage, the browser tries to fetch an icon from the HTML. The icon may show up in many places, including the browser tab, recent app switch, the new (or recently visited) tab page, and more.

Providing a high quality image will make your site more recognizable, making it
easier for users to find your site.

To fully support all browsers, you'll need to add a few tags to the <head>
element of each page.

Tiles in Internet Explorer

Microsoft’s "Pinned Sites" and rotating "Live Tiles" go far beyond other
implementations and is beyond the scope of this guide. You can learn more
at MSDN's
how to create live tiles.

Color browser elements

Using different meta elements, you can customize the browser and
even elements of the platform. Keep in mind that some may only work on certain
platforms or browsers, but they can greatly enhance the experience.

Chrome, Firefox OS, Safari, Internet Explorer and Opera Coast allow you to define
colors for elements of the browser, and even the platform using meta tags.

Meta Theme Color for Chrome and Opera

To specify the theme color for Chrome on Android, use the meta theme color.

Safari specific styling

Safari allows you to style the status bar and specify a startup image.

Specify a startup image

By default, Safari shows a blank screen during load time and after multiple
loads a screenshot of the previous state of the app. You can prevent this by
telling Safari to show an explicit startup image, by adding a link tag, with
rel=apple-touch-startup-image. For example:

<link rel="apple-touch-startup-image" href="icon.png">

The image has to be in the specific size of the target device's screen or it
won't be used. Refer to
Safari Web Content Guidelines
for further details.

While Apple's documentation is sparse on this topic, the developer community
has figured out a way to target all devices by using advanced media queries to
select the appropriate device and then specify the correct image. Here's a
working solution, courtesy of tfausak's gist

Change the status bar appearance

You can change the appearance of the default status bar to either black or
black-translucent. With black-translucent, the status bar floats on top
of the full screen content, rather than pushing it down. This gives the layout
more height, but obstructs the top. Here’s the code required: